Quotes & Sayings About Shootings

I don't get debate agains guns at all. Because we have it after every mass shooting. And now a terror attack. And the proposals that are talked about almost always have nothing to do with this specific event. — Chuck Todd

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other's blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven's love. — Aberjhani

Guns kill far more quickly and efficiently than knives, or crossbows, or toenail clippers; and, unlike bombs, you don't need to build one in your basement
they come ready-made! There's a reason why guns are the overwhelming weapon of choice among mass murderers. — Quentin R. Bufogle

Typical news accounts and commentaries about school shootings and rampage killings rarely mention gender. — Jackson Katz

The ban on assault weapons has decreased gun violence in Baltimore not one iota. That's because few, if any, of the shootings were done with assault weapons. — Gregory Kane

For every fatal shooting, there are about 3 non-fatal shootings. Folks, this is unacceptable in America. — George W. Bush

We've had drive-by shootings. I've been spat on, slapped, shot at. One guy tried to stab me with a broken beer bottle. But the way we look at it, if people do the worst they can, we'll still wake up in glory. — Troy Perry

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. — John F. Kerry

And then there was Joss. I met him in a dimly lit office, where he regaled me with tales of adventure, swashbuckling, shootings, spaceships, and narrow escapes. Um, where do I sign? He gave me a new identity, a costume, a gun, and a long brown duster for a cape. I remember that meeting so well; it was like a superhero "origin" issue. I remember Joss looking at Polaroid photos of my first costume fitting, holding up the one with the duster and gun saying, "Action figure, anyone?"
Never in my wildest. Like some sort of super-team benefactor, Joss made superheroes out of all of us, complete with a super-hideout spaceship. During filming, we'd all retreat to our dressing room trailers and emerge like Supermen with our alter egos. The boots, the suspenders, gun holstered low on my hip ... with a flick and a spin of that wicked awesome coat over my shoulders, I became someone else. — Nathan Fillion

I was so affected by the tragic shootings that took place in Newtown, Connecticut, as we all were. — James Langevin

The United States does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It's not the only country that has psychosis. And yet we kill each other in these mass shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than anyone else. Well, what's the difference? The difference is that these guys can stack up a bunch of ammunition in their houses, and that's sort of par for the course. — Barack Obama

We have seen a man dragged to death in Texas simply because he was black. A young man murdered in Wyoming simply because he was gay. In the last year alone, we've seen the shootings of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish children simply because of who they were. This is not the American way. We must draw the line. Without delay, we must pass the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. And we should reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. — William J. Clinton

America is the most violent democracy in the world. It's something that's met with great shock, horror, and mystery when I travel to other countries. They ask, Why are there so many shootings in America? Why does everyone own a gun? — Patricia Cornwell

The voices of peace can't be silenced by bombs, shootings, sieges, brutality and barbarism. Despite the challenges we face as peace-makers in a troubled region, all we want is peace and our campaign #WeWantPeace continues. — Widad Akreyi

Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process. — Sebastian Junger

Respecting the Second Amendment does not mean abandoning common sense. The right to own guns in this country must remain, while we also must strengthen our laws to prevent mass shootings. — Claire McCaskill

Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch. — Jillian Lauren

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick. — Raymond Chandler

Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags. — Vladimir Lenin

To claim that America's "culture of violence" is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer. — Stephen King

Too much attention to health is a hindrance to learning, to invention, and to studies of any kind, for we are always feeling suspicious shootings and swimmings in our heads, and we are prone to blame studies from them. — Plato

The real problem, both in discussions of mass shootings and in discussions of gun control, is that too many people are too committed to a vision to allow mere facts to interfere with their beliefs, and the sense of superiority that those beliefs give them. — Thomas Sowell

Minutes after the shootings, everybody's cell phone rang. — Francine Prose

...when one considers that there are more than 750,000 police officers in the United States and that these officers have tens of millions of interactions with citizens each year, it is clear that police shootings are extremely rare events and that few officers--less than one-half of 1 percent each year--ever shoot anyone. — David Klinger

An industry devoted to serving the public's right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known. This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria. — James Taranto

The intense media coverage of today's campus shootings presents a double edged sword. On the one hand, it gives us a chance to think about and reflect on the causes; on the other hand, in a very small minority of unstable minds, the repeated telling of the stories can be interpreted as glamorous. — Matthew Pearl

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges. — Frank Delaney

The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge. — Sissela Bok

School shootings were invented by blacks ... and stolen by the white man. — Chris Rock

There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerously mentally ill. — Ann Coulter

I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. — Megan McArdle

In more than half of American homes where there are both children and firearms, according to a 2000 study, the weapons are in an unlocked place, and in more than 40 percent of homes, guns without a trigger lock are in an unlocked place. Almost three-quarters of children under the age of ten who live in homes with guns say they know where the guns are. A 2005 study showed that more than 1.69 million children and youth under eighteen live in homes with weapons that are loaded and unlocked. According to a Department of Education study, 65% of school shootings between 1974 and 2000 were carried out with a gun from the attacker's home or the home of a relative. And the laws, it seems, are effective. One study indicated that in the twelve states where child-access prevention laws were on the books for at least one year, unintentional gun deaths fell by 23 percent. — Gary Younge

I happened to see Larry King interview Billy Graham shortly after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I had read an article the previous month about violent video games and their effects on the minds of children, desensitizing them to the act of killing. Larry King asked Billy Graham what was wrong with the world, and how such a thing as Columbine could happen. I knew, because Billy Graham was an educated man, he had read the same article I had read, and I began calculating his answer for him, that violence begets violence, and that we live in a culture desensitized to the beauty of human life and the sanctity of creation. But Billy Graham did not blame video games. Billy Graham looked Larry King in the eye and said, 'Thousands of years ago, a young couple lived in a garden called Eden, and God placed a tree in the Garden and told them not to eat from the tree ... '
And I knew in my soul he was right. — Donald Miller

What I know is my music gets blamed for school shootings. — Marilyn Manson

We've had mass shootings in the United States in the part of violent antiabortion protesters, in the part of violent pro-ISIS militants. The trick and the trap and the horror is not faith.I don't think the trap and the horror is fanaticism. — Adam Gopnik

Safe storage and child access prevention laws are critical steps as we seek to reduce the occurrence of accidental shootings and suicides involving guns. — Carl Levin

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why - fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating. — Dave Cullen

We Americans are not an inherently more violent people than folks in other countries. We're not inherently more prone to mental health problems. The main difference that sets our nation apart, what makes us so susceptible to so many mass shootings, is that we don't do enough, we don't take the basic common sense actions to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people. What's different in America is that it's easy to get your hands on a gun. — Barack Obama

I made 'Bowling for Columbine' in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue. — Michael Moore

Yet civil rights issues are very much on the front burner in South Carolina between the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings. — Ari Shapiro

This is the most exciting place in the world to live. Oh yeah! There are so many ways to die in New York City! Race riots, drive by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up and asbestos shooting into the sky. — Denis Leary

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers. — Cornell Woolrich

I'm truly blessed, because many of my friends come to Cuba. They like it here-they can relax and not worry about drive-by shootings or getting raped. — Assata Shakur

Certainly we're going to continue to see those commercials that I call 30-second drive-by shootings. And they're going to have a lot of money to do it. But we're going to combat it. — Tom Barrett

Life is about love and as a country that stands united, we lose in the battle that we call love. — Jonathan Anthony Burkett

Honestly this is not going to change unless the people who want to prevent these kinds of mass shootings from taking place feel at least as passionate, at least as mobilized and well-funded as the NRA and the gun manufacturers are because the politics in Congress are such where even members of Congress who know better are fearful if they vote their conscience and support common sense measures like background checks, they're worried they're going to lose. — Barack Obama

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America with genocide, then built it with slaves. The shootings will continue. It's who we are. — Michael Moore

Arguments that we will never stop all shootings by restricting access to such weapons fails to account for our strong and common desire at least to stop many of them - or any of them. — George Takei

Columbine was so frightening. And the media took off with it, like everything else, so it instilled more fear in people. You're looking around at school for kids like the ones who committed the shootings, and you feel wrong for doing that, you know? — John Robinson

What if everything operates by love?' I said to her, 'I mean, what if this God presence ... is God moving through us and through everything we do? If so, why do we resist it? What if everything horrible that happens, from drive-by shootings to illness, is because we have broken this chain of love, and we don't know how to put everything right again? — Carolyn Weber

Forget 'pray the gay away.' I you're more turned on by an AR-15 than a pair of tits, time for some serious therapy. Time for all you gun-humpers to come out of the closet. Is this really about the 2nd Amendment and self-defense
or just a pathetic fetish for guys with tiny pee-pees? — Quentin R. Bufogle

I didn't react visually. This girl came up and knelt over the body and let out a God-awful scream that made me click the camera. (On photographing Mary Vecchio with slain student Jeffery Miller during the shootings of students at Kent State, April, 1970.) — John Filo

My stories are of gas chambers, shootings, electrified fences, torture, scorching sun, mental abuse, and constant threat of death. But they are also stories of faith, hope, triumph, and love. They are stories of perseverance, loyalty, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, and of never giving up! — Livia Bitton-Jackson

Mass shootings are all part of a vast Left-wing conspiracy to undermine the 2nd Amendment and deprive your 6-year-old of his God-given right to bring a Bushmaster to class for "show and tell" ... The one he got from his psychotic, meth-addicted uncle's trailer while the latter was out getting the Confederate flag tattooed on his face. Remember, guns don't kill: the dimwits who insist EVERYONE should have the right to own 'em do. — Quentin R. Bufogle

If you really have to get shot, Belfast is one of the best places to do it. After twenty years of the Troubles, and after thousands of assassination attempts and punishment shootings, Belfast has trained many of the best gunshot-trauma surgeons in the world. — Adrian McKinty

A recent survey of Top Five Fears places public speaking alongside "identity theft" and "mass shootings." In the 1980s, it completed with "nuclear destruction." In the 1970s, "shark attack. — John Capecci And Timothy Cage

The other thing to realize is that almost all these shootings, including this shooting [in San-Bernardino], happened in a government building where people are not allowed to defend themselves. While it's not the ultimate answer, the ultimate answer would be no violence, part of the answer is saying, "We need to allow people to defend themselves." — Rand Paul

Our inner life is what makes us human and, to me, it's even more important for the way we live now. We're constantly assaulted by all kinds of things - cell phones, televisions, ads, cars, news of war, the bad economy, shootings. It's endless. Can you imagine just continuously reacting to these things? You lose your soul. — E. Journey

None of my characters seem to have had sex yet - I haven't written about that. And I wouldn't want to deal with what's happening in Oregon - the school shootings. — Paula Danziger

We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes — Charles Bukowski

In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws. Not only are there 60 percent fewer gun massacres after states adopt concealed-carry laws, but the death and injury rate of such rampages are reduced by 80 percent. — Ann Coulter

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said - it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness - this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really - tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too - the lengths most men went to to prove that they were tough guys. — Wally Lamb

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon.' It's much too late. — Ezra Klein

Recent school shootings have lured ill-informed Americans into a war on our Second Amendment guarantees, led by the nation's tyrants and their useful idiots ... The Second Amendment was given to us as protection against tyranny by the federal government and the Congress of the United States. — Walter E. Williams

A system in which legal police shootings of unarmed civilians are a common occurrence is a system that has some serious flaws. In this case, the drawback is a straightforward consequence of America's approach to firearms. A well-armed citizenry required an even-better-armed constabulary. Widespread gun ownership creates a systematic climate of fear on the part of the police. The result is a quantity of police shootings that, regardless of the facts of any particular case, is just staggeringly high. Young black men, in particular, are paying the price for America's gun culture. — Matthew Yglesias

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. — Steven Pinker

One of the arguments that authoritarian governments use to ward off the call for greater political freedom is to argue that American-style democracy is no guarantee of good policy ... Over the years, I've grown used to these arguments, and my response has rarely wavered: Sure, we might make dumb choices sometimes, but we will defend, to the end, the right to make choices at all, because we believe that our collective conscience, freely expressed, will eventually lead us in the right direction. When it comes to guns, it is getting harder to muster that argument abroad. Every new shooting, every new failure of will and citizenship, slashes another hole in our credibility as a way of life. — Evan Osnos

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born ... — Khaled Hosseini

It was a very intense and stressful situation. There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we'd play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. — Jay-Z

In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time? How can anyone know these things and still walk around free? — Helmuth James Graf Von Moltke

To all the kids from the "special" reading class back in high school (the one where you tried to form words using wooden blocks)
PLEASE stop telling me that I can't blame an "inanimate object" for the off-the-hook gun violence in this country. YES! ... I CAN!!! I blame all the "inanimate objects" in Congress who refuse to pass sensible gun legislation because they're too chicken-shit to take on Wayne LaPierre and the gun lobby. — Quentin R. Bufogle

In some deep, dark way we all become salacious around a disaster; our mouths water slightly when there's a real emergency. Hurricanes, typhoons, wars, shootings, epidemics; we're a little aroused because now we really have something to think about rather than our monotonous lives; something to take the focus away from our to-do list. — Ruby Wax

We need to work for a day when police shootings are rare and not the stuff of our daily news. — David Horsey

An estimated 9,000 American citizens are killed every year by illegal aliens. That's 25 American citizens per day killed by illegal aliens, averaging 12 by stabbings and shootings and 13 by DUI and related crimes. — Russell Pearce

Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. — Ted Turner

When my son Lowell was eight years old, one day he and I had just finished playing. Tired and exhausted, we were lying on the bed talking. He sat up in the bed and started to trace his finger over the scar behind my neck. He asked me with concern in his voice,
'Daddy, how you got this cut behind your neck?'

I hesitated for a while, wondering how much I should tell him, or if I should even tell him at all. I decided to tell him some of it, leaving out the part about the shooting. So I told him,
'I got that from fighting with one of my friends.'

Lowell didn't respond right away. After a moment of silence and tracing his finger over the scar, my son said something to me that I had never even considered up to that point. He said,
'Daddy, your friend tried to kill you! — Drexel Deal

When I snatched the gun out of his hand, it fired because the hammer was already pulled back. It made the thunderous sound that the .357 magnum is known for. Even though the sound itself was deafening, it was like beautiful music to my ears. Just a few short seconds ago, the odds were greatly stacked against me. Now the tides had turned. The odds were now stacked against them, and they knew it. When I turned around to face my pursuers, they were in an all-out retreat. All I saw were their backs. — Drexel Deal

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. — Brooks Brown

How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents? — Jackson Katz

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work. — Richard Engel

However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated / targeted for those shootings - even though most come at the hands of white dudes. — David Sirota

If what she is saying is true, then the rest of the world is numb, and we who suffer from ailments of the psyche are the ones who are more advanced in nature. We see the decaying of society, the neglect of morals and human decency: the school shootings, the crimes humans commit against one another, the crimes we commit against ourselves; and we react to them in a way that is more intense than everyone else. Yes, I think. Yes, this is the truth. — Tarryn Fisher

The funny thing is all these school shootings that we have, always happen in very religious communities. Maybe it's because the centre of their lives is a big fat nothing and it's just a fantasy and there's nothing there. I think maybe that might have something to do with it. — Matthew Bright